POWERING pEOPLE

"How might we make community led renewable energy transitions accessible to everyone, including those most in need?" was the question we were proposed with, and from there we had to come up with our own way of tackling this wicked problem.

I had started by doing research into Renewable Energy and community based projects around the uk on both large corporate scales and smaller local scales.

During my research I had decided to focus in on the issue of energy consumption in street lighting. So I starting leaning my research towards that, the issues, current projects in place, and how to mitigate this potential problem.

I had then found some data about LED street lighting in communities throughout the uk.

I had then worked out roughly how much Carlisle would save if they switched all their streetlights to LED bulbs by using an energy calculator.

I created a quick research document to keep all my findings together as well as sort out data and information on how I'm going to tackle this problem.

Wicked Solutions:
- Use the streetlights to reveal the poster on a wall.
- Create a stencil or outline, when the streetlight turns on it shows the poster messages as either a shadow or as light.

I had chosen to narrow down on the town of Crawley in the UK, which is the only town in the UK which has no LED street lighting at all, as for the medium I chose to target the general public of Crawley with a poster campaign, ages 16 - 34. I chose this age range as since they are younger they will be more active and open in getting involved in a potential activist campaign. When thinking about how to make people take action once made aware of the issue, I wanted to come up with a way to essentially force the local council to replace these old HSP streetlights with energy efficiency LED streetlights. My thought was to design a variety of stickers which will be given out to the public for them to cover streetlights around town with, the stickers would feature a range of bold messages implying that this streetlight is not an LED streetlight. In theory the stickers will make the HSP streetlights an eye sore, the council will then get complaints from the younger generation who want to make a change and help become more environmentally friendly, people who will want the council to save money and use it on other local town projects to better the Crawley community, and the older generation who will not like the look of the streetlights being graffitied with sticker. In order to ensure that the stickers cannot just be washed, pulled off or stripped away I will make sure that the stickers are a heavy duty extra tack waterproof sticker which cannot just be pulled off, which in theory will push the council to replace them.

I had then started to design some potential poster ideas

Once I got to this point I decided I wanted to change my direction and lean more into the LED aspect of it and create it in a different medium and focus on more animated design as that would appeal to my younger audience more, but I also think this will allow my design to be more captivating.

Some things I was thinking about while designing this LED 2.0 was the display, location and the medium.
Focusing in on the physical graphic of the LED allowed me to rebrand the whole campaign in a different visual styling.

Some of the modes I would use to display this new 2.0 project are Digital LED Billboards, Digital poster stands, and LED road marking devices. Since it involves more animation I will also be able to use this material for social media, but also be able to use the graphics as still posters.

Below are some of the designs I've started to come up with, conveying the same message as before but just in a different styling.

I experimented with adding a glow onto the text to make it feel more like an LED

No Glow

Glow

No Glow

Glow

I was liking how the LED nodes looked against the plain black background as it gave it that clean design style while still having those connotations to the LEDs, but I also wanted to try it on a matrix board background which is how it would look if it was actually displayed this way.

Since I wanted to make some digital billboards I started working on that in AE, starting with one for a large scale billboard

I then wasn't sure if I should end the billboard animation on the 'make the switch now' ending it on a powerful message, or to add the phone number to the local Crawley council or a possible social media handle, either a hashtag, instagram handle or even a website.

I played around with having the text come over eachother and overlap during the transitions which gave It quite an active and rebellious feel.

While this started as a billboard animation I feel like it could easily have other uses, such as online adverts or for local TV channel adverts, as it has a 'breaking news' style too it, almost like a hacked broadcast announcement which would catch an audiences eye when watching TV. So below I mocked it up as an interruption on the local Crawley news.

Following on from some feedback I made some adjustments in my design as I moved forward, the first was to change the colour from red to another colour.